Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

One theory of the mermaid myth is that European sailors, desperately horny after a transatlantic journey and not too keen of sight, mistook the manatees of Florida and the West Indies for beautiful maidens. A close look at a manatee would probably have cooled their ardor; this enormous sea mammal looks something like a cross between a seal and a cow, and it's hard to imagine any human, however passionate, finding one sexually appealing.

Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to one manatee another can indeed constitute hot stuff. A male manatee's sexual desires are not by any means limited to female manatees. Male manatees frequently engage in long bouts of nuzzling, riding on each other's backs, and rubbing their penises against each other. Manatees are not monogamists, either. Scientists have witnessed large manatee orgies, persisting for hours, and consisting only of males who "kiss" each other, embrace, and rub their penises together. (What would Anita Bryant say if she knew what was happening in the rivers of the Sunshine State?)

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Other marine mammals show similar sorts of behavior. Amazon river dolphins (or botos) participate in a wide range of homosexual activities, the most exotic of which is found when one male dolphin inserts his penis into the blowhole of another! Many species of whale and seal are also characterized by high levels of homosexual and bisexual behavior.

These are just some of the fascinating pieces of information found in a new book, Biological Exuberance, by Bruce Bagemihl. Bagemihl has mined the zoological and ethological literature and compiled a list of 190 animal species for which homosexuality has been observed. This was often not an easy task due to the implicit homophobia of many of the scientific observers, who did their best to ignore, obscure, or explain away the behavior that they were witnessing. Homosexual activity between animals in captivity is often dismissed as an abnormal artifact of their condition. Such activity in the wild is explained away as "dominance behavior," "a reaction to a disturbed environment," "mistaken identification," or evidence of "hormonal imbalance." One researcher even went so far as to physically separate two female hedgehogs engaged in sex with each other for fear that they might "suffer damage" from being allowed to continue.

Readers of this column will no doubt find much of this language familiar, since it is the same sort of language that is used to dismiss or explain away human homosexuality. Bagemihl does an excellent job of cutting through the rationalizations and misinformation of the zoological literature to demonstrate that homosexuality is widely distributed across mammal and bird species, and his research ought to provide the ultimate argument against bigots who argue that we are unnatural. But it doesn't explain just how those sailors got revved up for a manatee....